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Periscope now has comment moderation

Twitter has announced the launch of comment moderation on the hugely popular live broadcast app, Periscope.

Such is the popularity of Periscope that many will have seen the potential for abuse or suffered from it already.

Twitter have said:

“We’ve seen incredible communities and real-life friendships form on Periscope because it’s live, unfiltered and open. We’ve also seen broadcasters get discovered and quickly grow a large, public following. But with this openness comes an increased risk for spam and abuse, and this is something that we take seriously.”

With that in mind, they’ve announced the following new features:

During a broadcast, viewers can report comments as spam or abuse. The viewer that reports the comment will no longer see messages from that commenter for the remainder of the broadcast. The system may also identify commonly reported phrases.

When a comment is reported, a few viewers are randomly selected to vote on whether they think the comment is spam, abuse, or looks okay.

The result of the vote is shown to voters. If the majority votes that the comment is spam or abuse, the commenter will be notified that their ability to chat in the broadcast has been temporarily disabled. Repeat offenses will result in chat being disabled for that commenter for the remainder of the broadcast.

The ability to report comments is welcome, as is the potential for it to identify commonly reported phrases.

The voting system is intriguing. Given the ability to agree or disagree with something another user deems to be an unwelcome comment is very interesting indeed and may highlight differences between the audience demographics and age groups on Periscope.

However, the fact it might then lead to the poster being unable to comment at all is both useful and not without dangers. It could lead to viewers ‘ganging up’ on perfectly reasonable users if not policed adequately.

We’ll track the new system carefully and see how users engage with it.

The features are more than welcome though on a platform that could otherwise suffer at the hands of those with less positive motives.